Focus on Fear

I am not a brave person. Although at the time I didn’t particularly see myself as such, I reflect on my childhood as being full of jittery, frightened moments. I was a small and rather timid child, slight in stature and composition and also courage. I didn’t particularly care for most creepy crawly things that boys are often associated with and while I had a pretty big mouth (good for getting oneself into frightening situations) I had no spine to back it up with and spent a lot of time fleeing moments that looked like they may come out badly.

The first moment I recall experiencing genuine fear was as a small child in the first home I remember: A little three bedroom number in San Leandro right underneath the BART tracks. It had a detached garage that sat near the back of the property so we had a fairly long driveway that was open to the neighbor’s identical driveway. I don’t recall my parents spending a lot of time talking to the neighbors… my memory pegs them as vaguely white trash in disposition, but they had a young son whom I remember playing with on occasion in our practically shared driveways.

I can’t say how old he was at the time, I must have been four or five so I’m guessing he was maybe ten. He was older and I dimly recall thinking of him as a friend for some time although later I would think of him only in terms of what a ruthlessly cruel tormentor he became. He decided one day to scare me by donning a mask and poking his head over his back fence (which looked out over the driveways where we had been playing). The mask wasn’t particularly scary, but he just stood there, staring at me. At first I was nonplussed but unconcerned, and I implored him to quit clowning and get back to the game. But he remained still, coldly watching and making phony but eerily muffled growling noises. After a few moments of this he disappeared behind the fence once again.

It took me a few minutes to puzzle out that it was possible that the creature over the fence wasn’t my neighbor (Shannon) at all, but in fact someone or something else entirely. I fled into my backyard through the open fence gate and all the way to the other side of the house where I crouched in the side yard for a few minutes, peeking out just enough to see past our gate and to the neighbor’s fence. Eventually the monster reappeared, this time looking around. For me.

I waited it out for a while until the monster disappeared and I heard Shannon emerge from his house again. I ran back out to see what was up. He acted like he had no clue what I was talking about. I tried to convince him for a while and eventually he said he’d go see what was up. He went back into the house and a few moments later the monster appeared over the fence. At this time I was no longer sure it was some person in a goofy Halloween mask, it was clearly some malevolent being who had some sort of interest in me personally. Clearly this interest could lead to no good, so I did what any other mostly chicken five year old would do when presented with this new and frightening development: I ran inside to tell mommy.

Eventually I wandered, timidly, back outside and found Shannon there, wondering where I was. I asked him what had happened and he made up some story about scaring off some other kid by hitting him in the head with a rock. I accepted the story for the most part, but I kept a close eye on that fence from then until really the day we moved.

After that time there were at least two other incidents where someone—undoubtedly Shannon—would wait until I was outside and then don some sort of mask or another and poke his head through the window or push aside the curtains to frighten me.

And it worked. I specifically remember being shocked by a skeletal mask at one point and storming into the house in tears telling my parents that I wanted to move. Their response was typical of an adult who is weary of dealing with a skittish kid who has nothing better to be frightened of than a stupid rubber mask: Shut up and stop being a baby.

We moved out of that house when I was nine years old. In the time between the mask incident with Shannon and our move, two other events conspired to make sleep a difficult task: For one, I saw Cloak and Dagger in the movie theater (strangely I recall this being a double feature with The Jungle Book). The movie isn’t scary, so don’t misunderstand. It’s not like my parents took me to see Poltergeist or anything: Cloak and Dagger was kind of like WarGames or Tron only with spies and detectives instead of crazy computers or living video games. But what got me was that near the beginning a man is pushed to his death over a stairwell. He falls and naturally dies. There is some complication shortly thereafter where the body is not found or the man who supposedly dies is seen walking back up the stairs—it was too much for my young mind to comprehend. But I do recall the plummet of that man to his death as being the most intensely frightening thing I could think of.

Another thing I saw was a few short seconds of the television miniseries V. Of course the part I saw included one of the lizard-like aliens with half his human disguise ripped off in long ribbons of pseudo flesh with the green scaly true face poking out from beneath. I wasn’t allowed to watch the show but a mis-timed request for water or a poorly thought out sense of curiosity had lasting impressions.

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